the sick and wounded men of the army, but the comparatively small dimensions to which it has gradually reduced the call for outside aid and relief, by the energetic and humane administration of the Medical Department which it has aided in procuring.

It is not the fault of the Sanitary Commission, if exaggerated ideas of its claims and importance, as compared with those of the Medical Department, prevail in many quarters. In public addresses in all the great cities, in published letters to Governors of States and to State Surgeon-Generals, in its regular reports, and under all circumstances, it has magnified and celebrated the growing efficiency of the Medical Department, chronicled its vast and beneficent reforms, defended the Bureau against unjust charges, shown the recklessness of the rife rumors as to the general negligence, cupidity, and impotence of the surgeons in the service, and endeavored to acquaint the public with the dependence of the sick and wounded. on the care, pity, and generous provision of the government itself, rather than on outside aid and mercy.

It is plain how exposed to misapprehension the Medical Department of so vast an army as ours is, how little credit it gets for the regular and successful performance of its duties, how much blame for its occasional failures to meet the exigencies that beset its affairs. All the while, for food, clothing, shelter, medical care, nursing, transportation, the sick or wounded soldier is dependent upon, and actually receives, seven eighths of all he needs from the government itself. The other eighth he must owe to the pity and care of some outside beneficence. He himself is apt to accept only as his due, and therefore thoughtlessly and ungratefully, all that the government does for him, and to have the liveliest sense only of what it does not do, and to utter the most indignant complaints at its neglect. Of course he gives a corresponding gratitude to those who come in as volunteers to supply the necessary or unavoidable defects and omissions from which he suffers; and the Sanitary Commission, or some similar organization, gets for its comparatively light labors the praise and the gratitude really due in much larger measure to the government itself and the Medical Department, above all, to the laborious and

devoted surgeons themselves. It is the old fallacy we think more of the two-penny ounce of butter than of the ten-penny loaf of bread; because one merely satisfies our hunger, and the other gratifies our palate. The Sanitary Commission, being really in earnest, laboring not for praise, but for practical results, saw the vast importance of strengthening and stimulating that system to which the soldier must owe seven eighths of his chances of escape from sickness, and of care and comfort when sick; and that no skill or success in managing and magnifying its own contingent work, which at the utmost was but a fractional interest, could be any sort of substitute for the zeal and efficiency of the regular department. It saw and recognized the value of the loaf of bread, and determined not to allow the butter question to blind its own or the public's eyes.

But, after all, it had its own work to do, and to do well. It was plain enough, after a very short study, that the general utility and success of the army system, and of the Medical Department as a portion of it, depended upon rigidity of method. Discipline is the soul of an army; strict accountableness and limited responsibility are essential in the administration of military affairs. Routine makes the skeleton, and red-tape applies the ligaments to the system.

To attempt to supply an army as a family or a village or a city is supplied, or to carry civil maxims or customs into the camp, is a pure impossibility. Strict rules and regulations, and compulsory and inevitable conformity to them, are the conditions of the largest good to the largest number. It is certain, beforehand, that this necessary system will press with terrible severity upon a considerable class of exceptions; but to consider these exceptions, and bend the system to accommodate or include them, would be to imperil the advantage of that vast majority which the rule is established to serve. the tape is so loose that any one paper can be easily pulled from the bundle, all the papers are likely to be lost, or found scattered by the wind. The Sanitary Commission, therefore, has never joined in the popular cry of too much red tape; it has never asked for, or consented to, any scheme for conducting medical affairs in a free and easy manner, without

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military subordination and carefully limited responsibilities. Whatever evils have attended this system, have been less than those its removal would instantly evoke. Indeed, it was mainly to enable the Medical Department to maintain its own rules with rigorous fidelity, that the Commission undertook to look after only those individual wants, and those exceptional sufferings, which grow out of the necessary imperfection of all large systems, and which have always furnished it its only legitimate and welcome opportunities of service. That the exceptions in an army of a million and more of men, at one time or another in the field, with an average sick list of at least fifty thousand men, should be numerous in themselves, however small relatively to the number taken care of by the Medical Department itself, is what the most thoughtless might anticipate. They have been numerous enough and constant enough to task the utmost liberality of the nation, and to afford the most steady and exhausting labor to the Sanitary Commission. At no time have the extra supplies furnished by the public to the Commission, or to any and all outside ministries, been fully equal to the demands. Nor, with the experience now afforded to the careful students of army movements and exigencies, does it appear at all strange that great and frequent failures should attend the best plans of the Medical Department; battles proving general, when they were expected to be skirmishes or reconnoissances; the wounded turning out twice as many as any reasonable foresight could have anticipated; time and place of fighting being both suddenly changed; transportation impeded or preoccupied by greater necessities; and movements of the enemy, instantly defeating the whole, and the most sagacious, arrangements made by Medical Directors.

Let it be remembered, that the first office of an army is to fight, and that the first necessity of the government is to look after the fighting men, providing them with adequate ammunition, food, and reinforcements, that at the time of an impending battle, or during one, the chief solicitude is not, cannot, and ought not to be about the wounded, but about those still able to fight, and it will be seen how perplexed, delayed, and hampered the Medical Department must be, in getting

forward its stores, in removing the wounded, or in taking care of them promptly. The first interests of the army require that the Medical Department should be left in this subordinate and dependent. position. You cannot afford it independent transportation without destroying its co-ordination with the other departments, and embarrassing it nine tenths of the time with the care of trains, horses, and forage, for the sake of the advantages that would accrue to it for the other tenth of the time. Nor can the commanding general safely allow his hospital stores to be jeoparded by advancing them to the front, which doubtless would, if safe, be the most convenient for the service of the wounded or the sick. Thus, after the battle of Gettysburg, when Meade was pursuing Lee's flying army, and another general battle was hourly expected near the old field of Antietam, the General would not and could not allow the vast medical stores required in case of a battle to be brought over South Mountain, because Boonsboro, beyond which his own head-quarters lay, and where the Sanitary Commission had opened its storehouses, was liable any day to be attacked and ransacked by the enemy's cavalry. This was prudent and humane; and yet in case of a great battle it must have caused enormous suffering. Now, for this very reason that it was not safe for the government stores, the Sanitary Commission determined to run the risk of its own stores, that, if a battle did occur, it might alleviate the wants of the battle-field, till the regular medical stores could be brought up. Thus the Medical Department followed its legitimate and bounden course of duty in obedience to judicious orders from head-quarters. The Sanitary Commission, with its independent transportation, and independent movements in general, followed also its legitimate and necessary duty, and stood ready to prevent the evils which must otherwise flow from the best and wisest course left open to the Medical Department.

But it was not in battle-fields and exigencies chiefly that the Commission found most seriously tested its principle of doing nothing for the sick and wounded soldiers which it could induce or compel the government to do. Regimental, field, and general hospitals have been the steady sphere of its labors. It has spent its chief time, supplies, and energies in satisfying

the wants existing there. For the first year of the war, there was not commercial industry enough in the country to supply the actual wants of the army. Clothing could not be manufactured fast enough to meet the rapidly recruited ranks. Cloths were imported by the government as a protection against the enormous rates which holders of suitable stuffs were selfishly exacting. Besides, the ideas of the government bureaus did not and could not expand as fast as the unprecedented wants of the army did. Timidity and caution tied up even the boldest hands. The suffering which existed in the rank and file from want of blankets, stockings, overcoats, and tents was very great. The regimental hospitals, under new and inexperienced surgeons, without acquaintance with bureau routine, were often desperately deficient, both in what they might have had, if at the proper time they had known how to ask for it, and in what no skill in asking at that time could secure. The general hospitals were just beginning to be established. Inconvenient and wholly unsuitable buildings were the only ones within reach, and the government was not then aroused to the necessity of creating proper ones. The hospital fund, the usual adequate resource of the surgeon for all extra comforts and delicacies, now extensively — nay, universally - — in operation, could not at once be inaugurated, even by experts, and was utterly beyond the management of novices. It af forded no dependence for many months, and was of little use for the first year of the war. The Sanitary Commission took its place, and supplied a large part of all which the best and most efficient management could have yielded. It came in, everywhere, to do just what government and the Medical Department, in the sudden expansion of the army, by successive monstrous motions, from 75,000 to 300,000, to 500,000, to 800,000 men, could not so adjust means to ends, and supplies to the vast wants of the hour, as effectively and humanely to accomplish. But it did its work on system, according to analogous rules, and with a strict understanding with the department and bureaus, so as to discourage the imperfect preparations or inadequate arrangements of the Medical Bureau or Quartermaster-General; to make neglect hard and difficult and disagreeable for them; to uphold their efforts for